Showing posts with label anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Barry Gilheany ✍ Part 2 of a duplet on racism. 

Crucial to the unpacking of the assumptions articulated in Diane Abbott’s letter and to the creation and maintenance of genuine antiracist solidarity, is an examination of how “white” identity was invented.

 For by the end of the 19th century with the reality of race having been firmly established, the question of who was white was deeply contested. Then, in the space of a few decades at the turn of the 20th century, “whiteness” as is now commonly understood became consolidated as much out of fear as out of self-regard.[1]

The outworking of racial categorisation begins with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While the institution of slavery reaches back into the ancient world and was strongly embedded in most cultures and civilisations, the mode of slavery introduced to the Americas differed fundamentally from that pertaining in the premodern world. First, the industrial scale of plantation slavery required unprecedented numbers of slaves and a new and horrific degree of brutality. With their previous supply of Balkan and Circassian slaves cut off by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, European slave traders turned to sub-Saharan Africa (as the Islamic Empire had done) as their source of human chattel. Christian Europe’s slaves became almost entirely Black African as were slaves transported to plantations in the Americas. 

As Black slaves became the predominant labour force on New World plantations, it helped cement the categories of racial division as new arguments about the inferiority of Black Africans became entrenched in colonial communities. New laws created clearer distinctions between slaves and servants; black people and whites with laws in Virginia banning miscegenation and allowing property of backs to be expropriated and sold with the profits used to support poor whites. Beyond the pragmatic reasoning that slaves were cheaper and easier to control, the racialisation of slavery provided ideological justification for the acceptance of servitude in a society that proclaimed its loyalty to freedom and liberty.[2]

From the early days of the Republic to the 20th century only one group was deemed unconditionally as white – “Anglo-Saxons”. Who else belonged to the category was a matter of social negotiation. Doubts as to who could be white were there from the inception of the United States. In the view of Benjamin Franklin, the number of “purely white People in the World” was tiny: “All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny … And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also. Only “the Saxons” and “the English” were truly white. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” lamented Franklin.[3]

A century and a quarter later, in 1911, the Dillingham Commission set up by the US Congress to investigate the state of immigration at a time of mass panic about the about the quality of European immigrants, in its report noted that the Bureau of Immigration “recognises 45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe. It also noted Blumenbach’s “five great divisions of mankind” but broke down the “Aryan stock” (which it took as synonymous with “Caucasian”) into these distinct races – Teutonic, Slavonic, Italic, Hellenic, Lettic, Celtic, Illyric, Armenic and Indo-Iranic.[4]

The first group to pose the whiteness test for the American elite were the Irish. In the early decades of the 19th century, Irish immigrants were frequently referred to as “niggers turned inside out” and Black people as “smoked Irish”. The Irish were seen not just as socially and culturally, but also as physically distinct, “low-browed,” “brutish,” and even “simian.” To see white chimpanzees is dreadful,” the English historian and clergyman Charles Kingsley observed of Ireland.[5]

The British anthropologist John Beddoe, referred to earlier, created an “Index of Nigrescence” which supposedly quantified the degree of blackness in a population. He created a racial map which showed that the Irish, the Welsh and the Highland Scots were more “Africanoid” than the English. There were, he thought, traces of the “Mongoloid” among the Welsh, while the Irish were close to Cro-Magnons, a prehistoric ancestor of modern Europeans. However, in time, the Irish in America began to acquire their whiteness status partly because of their influence as a group (as in the legendary Tammany Hall Democrat political machine) partly also through their role in the enforcement of workplace colour bars against blacks (as portrayed in the film The Gangs of New York) [6]

Through such transatlantic faux scholarship and bureaucratic methodology, his histories of whiteness developed. For Europeans, sketching out the numerous races of the continent was an aid to nation-building and a means of explaining social divisions within and between nations. For Americans, it enabled a myth of ancestry and a legitimising narrative for their revolutionary story of freedom despite the millions enslaved and the majority denied suffrage. It also became a means of evaluating immigration and of policing relations between migrant groups.[7]

However, the popularisation and enthusiastic embrace of whiteness and white superiority by elites and common folk on both sides of the Atlantic went alongside fears about the future and security of the white race. The supposed phenomenon of wantonness of an increasingly racialised lower classes and fears of racial degeneration were widely disseminated in academic and popular discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Immigration from highly fecund Southern European groups conjured up fears of “race suicide” popularised by Theodore Roosevelt who became US President in 1901. He believed that the elimination by whites of inferior races was a moral good “for the benefit of civilisation.” He believed that for a race to succeed in “the warfare of the cradle,” it had to consist “of good breeders as well as of good fighters. Thus, wilful childlessness was a “sin for which the penalty is ... race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.” [8]

Married to the fear of race suicide were eugenic concerns about the quality of white or Anglo-Saxon stock. The promotion of eugenics is primarily associated with the polymath Francis Galton. Eugenics was “the science that deals with all influences to improve the inborn qualities of a race,” a programme for racial improvement through selective breeding. So as to ensure that in the words of the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, one of the most influential work of American scientific racism, “He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the waste”, 65,000 people were forcibly sterilised in the forty years after the Supreme Court had upheld the first eugenical sterilisation law passed by Virginia to order the sterilisation of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” concluded Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in summation of the Court’s verdict.[9] 

But yet. White superiority and self-confidence was stalked by primal fears. In Powellian style language, Charles Henry Pearson wrote forebodingly in his 1893 book National Life and Character that:

The day will come, and perhaps it is not far distant when the European observer will … see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent.

And whites … would be:

elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.[10]

Such apocalyptic fears fuelled the immigration panic in the US which led to a series of legal restrictions, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which banned all immigration from Asia and set quotas for European migrants based on the proportion of the American population already from a particular country.[11] Of course this was a global phenomenon as well, particularly in Britain’s “White Dominions”. Australia inaugurated its White Australia policy in 1901 with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act. It was soon followed by Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The mother country, of course, followed suit with the Aliens Act, 1905. Such immigration laws represented segregation on a large scale. It aims was to create a global version of Jim Crow laws.[12]

The Dead Ends of Racial Nomenclature

It is important to deconstruct “whiteness” and “white identity” because, by extension, all racial categories are artificial creations and, if antiracists are to avoid working in silos, it is of the utmost necessity to avoid falling into the essentialising traps that racial categories create. Racial categorisation has facilitated the emergence of competitive antiracism and hierarchies of oppression and the diversion of much discursive energy into the cul-de-sac of identity politics. At the heart of Diane Abbott’s letter is a failure to fully appreciate the dynamics of race formation how groups who do not have a “Black” or “Brown” skin colour such as Irish or European immigrants and Roma/Gypsy/Travellers were nevertheless abused in simian style ways. Two elements of Critical Race Theory therefore have to be challenged and removed from the repertoire of antiracism: White Privilege and White Fragility.

The problem of racism is primarily social and structural – the laws, practices and institutions that maintain discrimination. The stress on “white privilege” turns a social issue into a matter of personal and group psychology. Decrying white people in the manner of Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton “White people, you are the problem” and public declarations of mea culpa as that by the US-based British writer Laurie Penny who insists “ For White people acknowledging the reality of racism means acknowledging our own guilt and complicity”, distorts actually helps keep discriminatory power structures untouched. Yes, African American people are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for longer periods than white people in the US and have experienced well publicised brutality and homicidal treatment from police. But some analyses suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race, but income levels – the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be killed.[13]

Similarly, the disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 virus on BAME communities has been well documented. But class inequalities are important too – people living in the most deprived areas in England and Wales died from the virus at twice the rate in the least deprived areas. [14]

So, in these contexts, there is no need to set up race and class as differential and competitive casual categories against each other. Minorites of all hues comprise integral parts of the working class and often share similar experiences of state authority. Race and class shape people’s lives in complex, and dare it be said, intersectional ways.[15]

But perhaps the most egregious abuse of the concept of white privilege has been its application to Jews and Jewish experience of the Shoah/Holocaust. In a discussion on ABC’s The View on the removal by a Tennessee school board from the curriculum Maus a graphic novel about the Shoah, Whoopi Goldberg notoriously opined that the Holocaust “is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves”; it was “white on white” violence that exposed “man’s inhumanity to man”. Notwithstanding her profound apology in the wake of the ensuing outcry, what was disturbing from an antiracist viewpoint, was her ignorance about the historical use of racial categories. For race has never simply been about black and white. It’s a concept that has been used to deem certain people biologically incapable or unworthy of being equal. As we have seen, over the past two decades, not just Black and Jewish people, but Irish, Slavs, even the working class have, at various times, been viewed as racially distinct and inferior.

In relation Nazi Germany and the Jews, Goldberg’s comments demonstrate a stunning lack of awareness of the influence of US racist law on Nazi racial policy. The 1935 Nuremberg laws that established that a “citizen is exclusively a national of German blood”, that Jews were not of “German blood” and that marriages and “extramarital intercourse” were forbidden between Jews and citizens of German or racially related blood were directly influenced by the American “one-drop rule” – the belief that one drop of black blood made you “unwhite”.

Critical Whiteness and Jews

The case of the Jews among the whites illuminates the methodological problems of Critical Whiteness Studies and the discourse it is embedded in, not least on the concept of “whiteness” as such. It reveals a political problem, namely the disturbing presence of Jews in the arena of ethnic minorities as well as the presence of antisemitism in its multifarious manifestations.[16]

Over the past twenty years, it has become fashionable and even mainstream in American race scholarship to assert that Jews are white; that they belong to the dominant majority. This means, that as a collective, due to embedded racialised structures in society, they benefit from their dominant position and are complicit in oppression while, in a somewhat twisted manner, they are sometimes taken to be complicit in oppression also as individuals.[17]

The “whiteness” of Jews has, in the US at any rate been defined in two polar opposite ways. From the first, descriptive or interpretive, perspective, the question posed is whether Jews are still considered part of the nation; are they still “aliens” corrupting white America. This was definitely the stance of white supremacists and nativists throughout American history and which, through the emergence of the Alt Right under the Trump Presidency, may be gaining currency again.[18]

The second, critical, view, tries to establish that Jews, at least Ashkenazi Jews who make up the majority of American Jewry are unquestionably white, as they enjoy a. stable place in the white majority. This stable attribution of “whiteness” is problematic as it reflects an intention to show that Jews, despite their former status, as an ethnic and religious minority have come to occupy powerful and dominant positions in society and now belong to the oppressive white power structure. On this reading, Jews realise the curse of all promises: they enter into the world of the multicultural and become successful within it. Thus, they become the new “establishment” when, by the 1960s, other groups in the Western world begin to seek their multicultural space. The trajectory of the image of Israel from the embattled, overwhelmed, rescued fragment of European Jewry to “Super-Jew” and then the “racist” archvillain parallels this cultural tale.[19]

This image of Jewish whiteness is often reinforced by the conception of “intersectionality,” which formulates the interconnectedness of all dominated positions and the experiences of oppressed groups, and which thereby links Israel to Jewish whiteness and domination. In this kind of discourse, the U.S. represents an empire of interlinked systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and Jews can be presented as white dominators in the Middle East, colonising indigenous non-white Arab population. It must be emphasised though that critiquing this racialised view of the Israel/Palestine conflict does not amount to a defence of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; the oppressive controls exercised over the Palestinian Arab population in that Iron Cage or the blockade of Gaza. Its criticism of the introduction of a colour line into conflicts that relate neither to American race relations nor with European Scramble for Africa type of colonialism.[20]

Critical Whiteness and Intersectionality also seek to relegate antisemitism to the background or to the embers of history as it would dilute the criticism conducted in favour of the “really oppressed.” This discursive imperative is explicitly articulated by the leading figure of “intersectional feminism,” Linda Sarsour. Speaking in a video published by the antizionist Jewish Voice for Peace group, she said in terms not dissimilar to that by Diane Abbott:

I want to make the distinction that while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish American than anti-Black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic ... Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or maybe on an individual level … but it it’s not systematic and we need to make that distinction.[21]

So for Linda Sarsour, antisemitism is not a collective or structural phenomenon, but the sum of individual acts and, of more import, antisemitic attacks carried out by other minorities (which is often the case especially at times of conflict and high tension in Israel/Palestine) cannot be significant, for they are not perpetrated by dominant (white groups), who determine the permanence of structural racism.[22]

So, for its polemicism on “colour blind” racism is utterly blind to the nature of antisemitism which unlike racism, which was birthed in modern times by 19th century pseudo-science, is a conspiracy theory which like all conspiracy theories conjure up a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. Consciously or unconsciously, by reducing all conflicts and social antagonism to race or a colour line, it reproduces the racial categories created by 19th pseudo-science on which white (or more accurately Anglo-Saxon) domination is built while closing off emancipatory projects based on class or other forms of social solidarity.

The Weakness of White Fragility

An associated construct with Critical Race Theory and/or Critical Whiteness is White Fragility. Popularised by the book of the same name by the sociologist Robin DiAngelo. She defines White Fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviours such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation. According to her analysis, white people are all the unconscious beneficiaries of racism. But because they are insulated from this fact, they react defensively when confronted with racial realities. The feelings and behaviours that DiAngelo describes are for her mechanisms that protect white privilege by shutting down discourse and restoring a white racial equilibrium.[23]

In her critique of White Fragility, the social psychologist Valerie Tarico notes the absence of rigorous, statistical hypothesis testing in DiAngelo’s work but that, despite it’s apparent nebulosity and weak research base, the concept has spread widely into the corporate diversity and equality training world, the popular media and college curricula. She acknowledges that the concept of white fragility has resonated with millions of progressive activists and that confronting ugly unacknowledged, unconscious, “shadow” parts of ourselves, can be difficult and painful and can enable personal growth and more listening and engagement.[24]

But yet. Tarico argues that to assess the validity of white fragility as a valid psychological construct the following questions need to be asked: is the pattern of emotions and behaviours that it identifies unique to white people and to conversations about race; is it a single or multi-pronged pattern; do these responses actually function to restore white racial equilibrium and do these patterns change over time? She goes on to cite the Barnum effect whereby if a concept is defined broadly or loosely, it is easy to find examples like a fit. She points out that the Barnum effect relies on the human pattern of confirmatory thinking: our brains identify the parts that match and ignore the rest.[25]

But from a socially emancipatory viewpoint, the biggest drawbacks to white fragility and its parent, CRT, are that its division of the world into tribes of oppressors and oppressed and uniform experiences of benefit and suffering in each respective tribe do not necessarily reflect diversity and complexity in individual lives. Indeed, in critical theory to focus on such invites condemnation for perpetuating racism and sexism. Focus on inter-group differences and power hierarchies rather than on human universals and shared humanity that informs traditional social liberalism further alienates those being asked to concede power. By assigning guilt to white people for being born into the dominant group, CRT operates in much the same way as original sin in Biblical Christianity. Failure to acknowledge progress such as the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement leads to scepticism about factual accuracy and, by extension, about any prospect for racial harmony.[26]

But the greatest defect of all in CRT is the essentialisation of race and racial differences which, unintended or not, is the practical outcome of the doctrines they preach. Ultimately, like its Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-European counterparts, white nationalist or identarian movements, they lead humanity into the cul-de-sac of identity politics by eschewing the possibilities of common emancipatory projects such as the Anti-Apartheid and antiracist struggles of not so yesteryear when “Even though we organised autonomously, we saw our struggles as one”.[27] The essential pessimism and default anti-Enlightenment, perversely Occidentalist positions of CRT discourse and the inter-group conflicts it encourages are aeons away from such common struggle.

[1] Kenan Malik, 2023, p.65. A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. London; Hurst

[2] Malik, pp.66-70

[3] Ibid, p.71

[4] Ibid, pp.71-72

[5] Ibid, pp.73-74

[6] Ibid, p.74

[7] Ibid, p.73

[8] Malik, pp.76-77

[9] Ibid, pp.77-80

[10] Ibid, pp.92-93

[11] Ibid, p.82

[12] Ibid, p.92

[13] Kenan Malik “‘White Privilege Is a distraction, leaving racism and power untouched.” The Observer,14th June 2020.

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid.

[16] Balazs Berkovitz (2018) “Critical Whiteness Studies and the “Jewish Problem” “Zeitschrift fur kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie pp.86-102

[17] Ibid, pp.90-91

[18] Ibid, p. 87

[19] Ibid, p.87

[20] Ibid, p.88

[21] Ibid, p.89

[22] Ibid, p.89

[23] Valerie Tarico, Racism is Real, but the Concept of White Fragility Could Use a Closer Look. 

[24] Ibid

[26] Ibid

[27] Aditya Chakraborty “Never forget this. – if we fight racism in silos, we can’t win” The Guardian 27th April 2023.

Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

“My Experience Of Racism Is Worse Than Yours” ✒ Who Is White? The Construction Of White Identity

Barry Gilheany ✍ Many column inches and broadcast sound input have been expended over Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker’s comment on Twitter comparing the language around the UK Government’s Illegal Migration and Small Boats to that used in Germany in the 1930s. 

For many, Gary Lineker is an emblem for free speech and a high profile defender (though as a prolific goal scorer in his day, I am not sure this is an appropriate noun!) of the marginalised and those without a voice in society. For his opponents; he is a highly paid, left wing celebrity who uses his fame as a bully pulpit to hector the government on whatever trendy cause of the day. At the outset, I am making it clear that I am not of the latter party. However much more serious objections have been raised to the 1930s Germany analogy by, in particular, Jewish groups who complain of the trivialisation and appropriation of the Holocaust.

It is not the aim of this piece to accuse or acquit Gary Lineker of that latter charge. Though it is worth pointing out that a Holocaust survivor at a meeting in the Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s Faversham constituency levelled that particular accusation at her; that the demeaning and othering discourse used by proponents of the Bill is reminiscent of the sort of language that ultimately led to the murder of her relatives in the flames of the Shoah. For me, Gary Lineker or any other media personality has the right, on freedom of speech grounds, to use their private social media to express their opinions on any issue of the day within the laws of defamation.

For the lesson of the furore over Lineker’s tweet is that, in the words of Kenan Malik, contemporary anti-migrant rhetoric does recall the language of the 1930s but that the lingua franca was English.[1] He discusses how in the contemporary debates about Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution; two themes stand out in British policy: sympathy for the Jews facing the horrors of Nazism and the prerogative that their plight should not be seen as Britain’s problem. Malik quotes from Louise London who in her Whitehall And The Jews 1933-1948 states that Britain’s strategy:

was designed to keep out large numbers of European Jews – perhaps ten times as many as it let in… Escape to Britain was an exception for the lucky few; exclusion was the fate of the majority[2].

Malik goes onto cite the observation by the Holocaust historian Steve Paulson that German Jews were “treated as ‘bogus asylum seekers’ (because their lives were not yet in immediate danger) and ‘as economic migrants’ (because, having their means of livelihood, they would benefit economically by coming to Britain). In effect they were the 1930s vista of invading hordes of “immigrants trying to jump the queue, rather than people in desperate need.”[3] This should be the standard riposte to the scare and hate mongers on both sides of the Irish Sea who question the motives and economic status of refugees today.

Then, as now in Brexit Britain and its nightmare of “open borders”, the preservation of “British sovereignty” was brandished as an instrument to exclude refugees. To let in more Jews, officials claimed, would undermine sovereign control over who should be allowed entry. Then, as now, there was a desire not to allow refugees to set foot on British soil; in 1938, Britain imposed a visa system on migrants from Germany and Austria, “to stem… the problem at its source”, as Paulsson puts it.[4]

There laid bare in the shadow of the imminent perpetration of the greatest crime in human history is the immorality of British asylum and immigration policy in the 1930s and how it resonates today. Further injury was added to insult by the inclusion of Jews in the category of the 70,000 German and Austrian “enemy aliens” created after the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the later mass internment in May 1940 of 29,000 Germans, Austrians and Italians, mostly Jews.

All the major Western democracies imposed rigid immigration controls, against Jewish refugees, both before and throughout the Second World War. For instance when appeals were made to the British Foreign Office to take 19,000 Jews due to be handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy French regime for slave labour and then extermination in Poland, one officer replied

“We cannot turn our country into a sponge for Europe.”

Many of the aforementioned “enemy alien” internees were deported to Canada or Australia – ship load of deported Jews was sank when the Arandora Star was torpedoed in July 1940. For years, the existence of the concentration camps and the nature of the incipient Holocaust was denied or minimised on the grounds or in the words of another Foreign Office official: “As a general, the Jews are inclined to magnify their own persecution”[5]

That shameful episode is just one chapter of the racialised immigration and asylum policies pursued by UK governments since the turn of the 20th century. From the Aliens Act of 1968 which sought to keep out Jews fleeing pograms in Russia and Eastern Europe; through the 1968 and 1971 Commonwealth Immigration Acts with its invidious distinctions between “Old” (those from the White dominions of Australian, New Zealand, Canada etc) and “New” (those from the Caribbean and South Asian former colonies) Commonwealth subjects; the “hostile environment” for “illegal” immigrants instituted by a former Home Secretary in 2013 which led directly to the Windrush scandal whereby thousands of Caribbean residents in the UK born to immigrants from the West Indies were found to be “illegal” due to lack of identity residency documents such as passports; to the tsunami of lies told by Brexit campaigners during the 2016 EU referendum about 75m Turks being eligible to come to the UK and Nigel Farage’s infamous “Breaking Point” poster depicting Europe and, by extension, Britain being overrun by refugees of Middle Eastern origin right down to Suella Braverman’s justification for her Small Boats Bill in her apocalyptic claim that 100m asylum seekers and refugees can come to the UK.

Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill: The Chronicle Aftertold

The real story to be told about the Bill and its genesis begins in Australia. The model of intercepting refugee boats and putting asylum seekers into offshore camps was pioneered by Australia in 2001. In that year the conservative government of John Howard went into an election which he won as well as the subsequent one by promising to be tough on “illegal immigration”. It had already implemented a maximalist new asylum policy – one that meant that those who arrived by boat were sent for offshore processing on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru or the remote Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, to be detained indefinitely. In an explicit order from the Minister of Defence, “no personalising or humanising messages were to be taken of those who had come to Australia by boat. For they were, insisted the government, “potential terrorists”, “illegals”; “threats to national security” – the types of people it falsely said would throw their children overboard.[6]

A decade later, Tony Abbott built a campaign on a triple word slogan: “Stop the boats”. Politicians who opposed the measures were harangued as “soft on borders”. They secretly wanted “open borders”/ ”unlimited migration” with all its allusions to crime, terrorism and “illiterate” refugees taking Australian jobs and housing[7] and draining Australian public services.

Since its implementation, Australia’s offshore detention regime – an exact replica of that proposed in the UK’s Rwanda plan – has been subjected to the entire gamut of exposure of cruelty – from the UN, from foreign and domestic courts; from Senate inquiries, government reports, public service whistleblowers, media investigations and human rights groups. They all exposed the inevitable evils: refugees murdered and wounded by guards, children sent to adult prisons to be preyed upon; systematic sexual abuse, mass hunger strikes; repeated suicide attempts and the neglect of seriously ill people until it was too late.[8]

And yet the policy never did “stop the boats” Record numbers of asylums seekers continued to arrive by sea; the offshore processing centres were overwhelmed and eventually ceased operation and the arrival of boats was only slowed (albeit dramatically) by the pushback intervention of the Australian navy whereby the occupants of the boats are intercepted and forcibly returned to their country of origin in contravention of international law.[9]

Likewise, the UK counterpart has come in from unusually hard hitting intervention by the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, who has urged MPs and peers to reject the Bill on the grounds that its proposals “create clear and direct tension with well-established and fundamental human rights standards. She stated that by preventing people who arrive irregularly in the UK from having asylum claims assessed, it would strip away one of the essential building blocks of the protection system. Not to be deterred though are the MPs on the right of the Tory party who have proposed a series of amendments blocking judges from granting injunctions to stop deportations and to limit the scope of relevant parts of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)[10]

Also, Tirana Hassan, new Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has warned of a copycat effect amongst other conservative European governments arising from the UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Warning that the plan would “completely erode” the UK’s standing on the world stage, Hassan cautions of a “ very slippery slope” whereby “just a couple of pages out of the autocrat’s handbook that gets passed around” leading to far right populist governments like Hungary, Italy and Poland adopting similar measures like the Rwanda plan.[11]

On too many occasions, sadly, labour movements and politicians have played their part in creating this discursive hegemony around immigration. It was Harold Wilson’s Labour government which passed through the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act as a kind of quid pro quo for the 1965 Race Relations Act, the first of its kind in British history. It is hardly coincidental that 1968 was the year of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and the marches by East End dockers in support of Powell. Labour PM Clement Attlee as Prime Minister expressed anxieties about the prospects for existing race relations from immigration from the West Indies in the wake of the docking of HMS Windrush in 1947. More recently, “immigration controls” stood out as one of the five demands on the mugs produced for Ed Miliband’s ill-fated 2015 General Election campaign. Currently, migrant and asylum advocacy organisations are expressing disappointment at what they see as the reluctance of Keir Starmer, Labour leader, to explicitly condemn the racialised hostility to migration embodied in the Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill in order to recover lost Labour Brexit voters in the “Red Wall” seats. Paul Mason comments that Lineker had correctly judged the mood of the vox populi – be that his potential supporters, of politicians and of the wider public over the “Illegal Immigration Bill. He observes that large parts of progressive Britain were dismayed by Labour’s initial response to the Bill – that it wouldn’t work[12], rather than the cruelty of its proposal to automatically deport arriving and existing asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing and ultimate settlement on the acceptance of their applications.

Aliens Act 1905

This Act sought to limit immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe and was passed by the then Conservative government and then rigorously enforced by the Liberal government which was elected to power in 1906. This Act derived its impetus from the ethnic and religious tensions between Jewish and Irish communities in the Stepney district of the East End of London. In 1903, the Government had appointed a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in response to requests from Major William Evans-Gordon, Conservative MP for Stepney and from local trade unions. Further Aliens Acts were passed in 1914 and 1919 which further inflamed local tensions by trying to root out illegal immigrants, particularly Jewish refugees from Russia and Poland.[13] Sound familiar?

In many ways, the Aliens Act was the result of twenty years of working class agitation which took two forms. The first was the grassroots proto-fascist British Brothers League which operated in the East End between its foundation in 1901 and passing of the Act in 1905. The second was the organised labour movement. From 1892, the TUC was formally committed to a resolution excluding Jews; it included the issue of immigration control was included in a list of questions put to all parliamentary candidates compiled by a special TUC conference in 1895 and in 1896 the TUC sent a delegation to the Home Secretary in 1896 demanding immigration controls.[14]

Socialist opposition to the agitation for immigration controls did come from the Socialist League, a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and whose most famous figure is William Morris. The League’s journal Commonweal took a totally principled stance against immigration controls and antisemitism. In one article – sarcastically called “Blarsted Furriners” – the journal condemned the chauvinism and antisemitism of other left-wing groups by posing the age long question for all self-professed socialists:

Are we then to allow the issues at stake in the struggle between the robbers and the robbed to be obscured by anti-foreigner agitation?[15]

Apart from that honourable exception and that of other individuals, the remaining opposition to immigration control within the labour movement came from its Jewish s members. For sadly, support for immigration controls was overwhelming within the labour and trade union movement. A 1892 book The Alien Invasion named 43 labour organisations, excluding the TUC, calling for restrictions on Jews. Many trades councils also came out in support of controls including London where control was supported by esteemed rank-and-file dockers’ leaders Ben Tillett and Tom Mann.[16] In language that distressingly prefigures Nazi strictures on racial hygiene the socialist magazine The Clarion stated after the passage of the Act that Jewish immigrants were:

A poison injected into the national veins”, they were “the unsavoury children of the ghetto, their numbers were “appalling” and their attitudes “unclean” (June 22nd 1906)[17]

Arguments used then in favour of immigration controls have sadly both historic and contemporary resonance. It was said that Jewish workers were taking away English people’s jobs, undercutting wages, weakening unionisation and taking housing away from the English. Just as it has done throughout human history, antisemitism, being the hydra headed monster that it is, girded the debate on the Aliens Act on plural levels. Antisemitic movements from a specific racist perspective mobilised against working-class Jews while antisemitic arguments from a partially Marxian perspective were articulated around the notion of Jewish capitalist domination.[18]

One way of squaring this circle was to try and make some distinction between “rich Jews” and “poor Jews”. An Independent Labour Party (ILP) pamphlet arguing against immigration controls in 1904 – The Problem of Alien Immigration – compared “the rich Jew who has done his best to besmirch the fair name of England and to corrupt the sweetness of our national life and character” with the “poor Jew” who should be allowed in.[19]

More frequently, socialist groups tried to tease out actual links between “rich Jews” and “poor Jews” in order to condemn the latter as in some way pawns of the former. This rhetorical strategy is most glaring in the example of Beatrice Potter, one of the founders of the Fabians, who in her investigation of East End life, continually argued that the only aim of a Jewish worker was to become a capitalist writing in one essay that:

The love of profit distinct from other forms of money earning” is “the strongest impelling motive of the Jewish race.

And, furthermore, denied any presence of the powerful Jewish labour movement developing there; claiming in the same essay, that Jews as embryonic capitalists “have neither the desire nor the capacity for labour combination.”[20]

Ben Tillett offered an even more resonant and conspiratorial angle. He argued that it was ultimately the British government which was a pawn in the hands of Jewish capitalists and was therefore reluctant to bring forward controls. He asserted that “Our leading statesmen do not care to offend the great banking houses or money kings” and went on to say: “For heaven’s sake, give us back our countrymen and take us your motley multitude.” (London Evening News, June 19th 1891) He spoke on the same platform as avowed Jew-baiters like Arnold White at a meeting of an early control organisation – The Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens.[21]

The Aliens Act was aimed specifically at Jews by invoking specific antisemitic imagery be it variants of the world Jewish conspiracy or references to supposed Jewish physiognomy. Jews were frequently referred to as “The Nose” in The Clarion (September 1st 1892) Much of the radical literature describing alleged Jewish capitalist domination drew upon classical antisemitic tropes. For example, the campaigning journalist and prominent Labour Party member, A.J. Hobson, famed for covering the Boer War for the Manchester Guardian, opined that the Transvaal was controlled by “Jew Power” and “those who came early made most and then left leaving their economic fangs in the carcass of their pray” (Contemporary Review vol LXXVII)[22]

To invert Gary Linker’s words; it was the 1905 Aliens Act and similarly restrictive immigration legislation in both the UK and US and the poisonous discourse around them that foreshadowed the language of Germany in the 1930s and the cataclysm of the Holocaust and other racial-biological mass crimes committed by the Nazis. Antisemitism was also an ill-disguised feature of another monstrous totalitarian system of the 20th century – Stalinism. The caricature of Jew as all-powerful capitalist was replaced in Stalinist (and other ultra-left) demonology, by the equation of Zionism with world dominations and of all Jews being Zionist or at least responsible for Zionism. The notorious intended “Jewish doctors” show trial in which five Jewish physicians from the Kremlin’s own hospital who were accused in 1953 of trying, under “the influence of Zionism”, to poison Stalin and other members of the Soviet Politburo, only it not to go ahead due to the death of the Red Tsar, is an example. [23] The seemingly contradictory spectacle of “Jewish cosmopolitanism” was also articulated by the Kremlin at this time.

The trial and execution in Czechoslovakia in 1952 of the prominent Communist Party politician Slansky who was Jewish and twelve associates in a show trial is another example of Stalinist antisemitism. The “cleansing of Zionists” from the Polish Communist Party in 1968 and the denunciation in the 1980s of both the Polish Solidarity movement and its intellectual ginger group KOR as having “the Pseudo-Left programme of the Trotskyite International which is inspired by Zionist illustrates the ill-disguised antisemitism that was at the core of Soviet antizionism.[24]

Contemporary Antiimmigrant Discourse

With the discrediting of the racial biology discourses that underpinned the horrors of Nazism and the operations of overt racism in Apartheid era South Africa, in the Jim Crow era of the Southern United states and in European colonial empires, opponents of immigration (or what they would term “mass migration”) in the language of identity, culture and opposition to the harmful impacts of globalisation. But sanitised as it may be of the overtly racist themes of the anti-immigrant movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, their 21st century successors have managed to synthesise the language of radical left and right; of traditional conservatism and collectivist rallying to articulate new and old populist folk-devils Now the new visible target of nativist hostility is Islam or “the Muslims”; the new conspiratorial elite are the “globalists” represented in institutional forms like the European Union (EU) or the World Economic Forum (WEF) who wish to impose an one-size-fits-all New World Order (NOW) form of global governance on us all or ubiquitous figures such as Bill Gates and George Soros. However as we shall see shortly, a familiar folk enemy stalks the imaginings of anti-globalists and ethno-cultural nationalists.

Consider these two cri-de-coeurs for our times:

Will the earth be reduced to something homogenous because of deculturizing depersonalising trends for which American imperialism is now the most cynical and arrogant vector? Or will people find the means for the necessary resistance in their beliefs, traditions, and ways of seeing the world? This is really the decisive question that has been raised at the beginning of the millennium.[25] 
♜ ♞ ♟
The Westernisation of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably represented as “progress”. “Homogenising universalism … is only the projection and the mask of an ethnocentrism extended over the whole planet.[26]

These sentiments could have come from the manifesto of any radical left-wing project; particularly those of an anti-globalisation, anti-American bent. They are, in fact, the words of Alain de Benoist, the founder of the Nouvelle Droit in France and a philosophical mentor of the contemporary far right.[27].

At the heart of Benoist’s philosophy was the abandonment of racial superiority in favour of cultural difference, and the reworking of the relationship between community, identity and diversity. He wrote that “Different cultures provide different responses to essential questions; hence “all attempts to unify them will end destroying them.” In this volkish vision, “Everyone inherits a ‘constituent community which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms.”[28]

According to this cultural rather than racial logic, immigrants must always remain outsiders because they are carriers of distinct cultures and histories, and so could never be absorbed into those of the host nation. Recognising the impracticality (rather than inhumanity) of deporting all immigrants and their descendants from France , Benoist proposed the establishment of “parallel” communities to allow both the ”indigenous” and the “immigrant” to maintain” the structures of their collective cultural lives.[29]

In this apartheid type model “the equal remains different” and citizenship should be reserved for those who are “one of us”. For to be a citizen, in Benoist’s world, is to “belong.. to a homeland and a past.” Therefore immigrants could – or, at least, should – never be citizens as democracy only works with the coin coincidence of demos and ethnos.[30]

This agenda has been successfully popularised by Marine Le Pen and her National Rally Party founded in order to detoxify the explicit racism and antisemitism of the former Front National. Three interconnected issues are predominant in the worldview of Le Pen: hostility to globalism, to immigration and to Islam. For her, Globalism “aims to standardise cultures, to encourage nomadism, the permanent movement of uprooted people from one continent to another, to make them interchangeable and, in essence, to render them anonymous.” Like Benoist, Le Pen frames her opposition to immigration as respect for difference. “The world will survive only through human and cultural diversity, through diversity … but the only difference that counts is that between the “French way of life” and the rest.[31]

But Le Pen’s primary cultural animosity is directed towards Islam and its adherents. With “the Islamisation of our country” she asserts, “the majority [of French people] no longer feel at home in France." Muslims had “taken charge of entire neighbourhoods where they impose their vision, their culture, their proscription”. Muslims, in her demonology, are looked upon as “invaders” and “colonisers” undermining French culture not by wielding cosmopolitan or imperial power but by supplanting one culture with another.[32]

Le Pen’s potent combination of reactionary hostility to immigration and Islam (sometimes cloaked by faux secularism around the wearing of Islamic dress such as the hijab) and opposition to austerity, defence of jobs and support for the welfare state, traditionally left-wing concerns has established her and her party as key actors in French politics; winning more than 41 per cent of the vote in the second round run-off in the 2022 Presidential elections and 95 seats in the French National Assembly. It is a combination that was been weaponised in various degrees by other far right populist parties in Europe such as Gert Wilder’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the Swedish Democrats and the narrative of the economically and culturally dispossessed native working classes was a potent contributor to the Brexit and Trump victories in 2016 and undergird the current. populist opposition to the “invasion” of Britain by “small boats.

However, explicitly racist or racialised themes have not disappeared from anti-immigrant discourse. The 2010s saw a series of books warning of Europe “committing suicide”, such as Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany abolishes itself”, Eric Zemmour’s Le Suicide Francais (“French Suicide”) and Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (“Submission”). 

Arguably the most influential (and lethal) trope in contemporary nativism in the Western world is the creation of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory by the novelist and white nationalist conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus. In 2011 Camus published Le Great Replacement in which he proposed that globalists had created the “replaceable human, without any national, ethnic or cultural specificity”, allowing les elite remplacistes – “the replacing elites” – swap white Europeans for non-Europeans. In a perverse inversion of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, he describes non-Europeans in Europe as “colonists”, the elites remplacistes as “”collaborationists”, and the process of replacement as “genocide by substitution” .[33] It is hardly surprising that one of the inspirations for this Mein Kampf - meets -modern nationalist mythos is Enoch Powell.[34]

In the Anglo-American world replacement theory has gained traction with influential academics such as the economist Paul Collier who worries about the “indigenous British” becoming “a minority in their own capital and the London based American novelist Lionel Shriver who writes that “The lineages of white Britons in their homeland go back hundreds of years … and, yet, they have to “submissively accept” the ”ethnic transformation of the UK … without a peep of protest." Since 2016, the Great Replacement theory has become received wisdom in Republican circles in the US. Polls show that a third of Americans and nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters believe in it and that a secret cabal “is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains”[35]

The Great Replacement Theory and associated conspiracist narratives have acted as inspiration for far darker expressions of ethno-nationalism in the form of white nationalist terror. In 2011 Anders Breivik in his online manifest published prior to his van bomb attack in Oslo and the gun massacre of young left-wing activists on the island of Utoya which killed a total of 77 people blamed the Frankfurt School and “Cultural Marxism” for policies of mass immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness. In 2018, Robert Bowers shot dead eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He claimed that Jews were committing “genocide” against whites by leading a conspiracy to bring Muslims into the country. The previous year white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville chanted “Jews Shall Not Replace Us.”[36]

But the most apposite comment of all in light of the above discussion is the justification by Australian Brenton Tarrant for the two mass shootings he perpetrated at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 which killed fifty-one worshippers and wounded forty. He stated:

The attack was not an attack on diversity, but an attack in the name of diversity. To ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted [and] unrestrained in cultural nor ethnic expression and autonomy. To ensure that the peoples of the world remain true to their traditions and faiths and do not become watered down and corrupted by the influence of others.

These words appear in his manifesto “The Great Replacement”. [37] The real-life consequences of nonsensical but inflammatory theories in what, for so many, is a disturbingly changing world.

This odyssey into the history of UK migration and refugee policy tells us pace Gary Lineker it is not necessary to cite the most extreme example of hate filled language i.e. Nazi Germany (although such is the ultimate warning from history of where hate married to conspiracism leads to) to critique the inhumanity of the UK’s Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill. There are plenty of shaming episodes from past immigration and asylum policy and from its templates to use as comparators without causing unintended offence and grief to victims of Nazi Germany.

Notes

[1] Kenan Malik ‘Stop the boats’ does echo the language of the 30s – but those words were English. The Observer 19 March 2023.

[2] Malik, op cit.


[3] Malik, op cit.


[4] Malik, op cit.

[5] Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, Clarendon Press, 1979 quoted in Steve Cohen (2019) That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic. An anti-racist analysis of Left antisemitism.  pp.69-70 London: No Pasaran Media.

[6] Ben Doherty Australia’ ‘stop the boats’ playbook will damage Britain. Guardian Journal pp.1-2 28th March 2023

[7] Doherty, p.2

[8] Doherty, p.2

[9] Doherty, p.2

[10] Tory MPs push to Toughen Migration Bill as European Rights Chief Sounds Alarm. Guardian 28th March 2023

[11] Warning Over Global Fallout from Rwanda Asylum Plan. Guardian. 27th March 2023.

[12] Paul Mason “What Gary Lineker has taught us about the art of taking a stand” The New European. March 23-29, 2023

[13] John Bew (2017) Citizen Clem. A Biography of Attlee. London: Riverrun Press pp.69-70

[14] Cohen, p.26

[15] Cohen, p.28

[16] Cohen, p.27

[17] Cohen, p.27

[18] Cohen, p.33

[19] Cohen, p.36

[20] Cohen, p.37

[21] Cohen, p.38.

[22] Cohen, pp.42-43

[23] Cohen, p.56

[24] Cohen, pp.56-57

[25] Kenan Malik (2023) Not So Black and White. A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. P.275 London: Hurst & Company

[26] Malik, p.277

[27] Malik, p.275

[28] Malik, p.276

[29] Malik, p.277

[30] Malik, p.277

[31] Malik, p.278

[32] Malik, p.279

[33] Malik, pp.282-83

[35] Malik, pp.283-84

[36] Malik, pp.285-86

[37] Malik, p.286

Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

Asylum And Immigration ✏ The Real Lessons From The 1930s

Atheist Republic On August 26, a French court decided to deport an imam to Morocco.


Hassan Iquioussen, who was born in France but held Moroccan citizenship, is accused of anti-Semitic hate speech.

The Minister of the Interior of France, Gérald Darmanin, posted a tweet later that day which roughly translates to:

The Council of State validates the expulsion of Mr. Iquioussen who holds and propagates in particular anti-Semitic comments and contrary to equality between women and men. This is a great victory for the Republic. He will be expelled from the national territory.

Fifty-eight-year-old Iquioussen, infamous for his controversial anti-Semitic comments and misogyny, has a wide following of over 174,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 44,000 Facebook followers, which he operates from his home in northern France.

After the Paris Administrative Court suspended the expulsion of Hassan by order of the Interior Minister in late July, the case reached the supreme court of France.

Hassan’s lawyers strongly defended Hassan in the Paris court by saying that the expulsion would create "disproportionate harm" to his "private and family life."

Continue reading @ Atheist Republic.

France To Deport Moroccan Imam Over Anti-Semitic Speech

This draft review appears on People & Nature with thanks to Historical Materialism journal, to which it has been submitted for publication, in an upcoming special issue on antisemitism and the fight against it.

Review by Simon Pirani of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, by Brendan McGeever (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 247 pages.

In January 1918, two months after Soviet power was established in Petrograd, one of the Red Guard units tasked with securing that power on the ruins of the Russian empire entered Hlukhiv, just over the Russian-Ukrainian border, north east of Kyiv. The unit was pushed out of Hlukhiv by the counter-revolutionary Ukrainian Baturinskii regiment within weeks – but soon joined forces with a group of Red partisans who had arrived from Kursk in southern Russia, and took the town back. A pogrom ensued. The Baturinskii regiment changed sides, claiming they had only resisted Soviet power because the “Yids” had paid them to. The Red Guards, thus reinforced, rampaged around the town proclaiming “eliminate the bourgeoisie and the Yids!”

How many of the town’s 4000 or so Jews fell victim is unknown, but it was in the hundreds. Newspaper reports and eyewitnessed accounts detailed how, for two and a half days, families were lined up and shot, their houses were ransacked and Jews were thrown from moving trains. One report described how 140 were buried in a mass grave. There is no doubt that Hlukhiv’s newly-established Soviet authorities were complicit. After two days of constant killing, they issued an order, “Red Guards! Enough blood!” – but then authorised looting. The synagogue was destroyed and the Torah ripped up. The head of the local soviet then demanded payment from the Jewish survivors.

The funeral of a Jewish pogrom victim, Ukraine 1919

“In the case of Hlukhiv”, writes Brendan McGeever, “Soviet power was secured by and through antisemitism” (page 48). Within days of the massacre, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who commanded the Red forces in Ukraine, ordered the recomposition of all Red units in Hlukhiv and surrounding areas; those who resisted were to be shot. McGeever judges that this was “likely” a response to the pogrom. He also shows that the Bolshevik centre in Moscow systematically avoided discussing “Red” pogroms publicly. While Jewish newspapers reported Hlukhiv accurately, larger-circulation Bolshevik newspapers failed to identify the “Red” perpetrators.

The Hlukhiv pogrom was a relatively minor precursor to the ferocious wave of terror unleashed against Ukrainian Jews during the chaotic, multi-sided military conflicts of 1919, in which 1-200,000 died. Those pogroms were the climax of a wave that began in 1917, the year of revolution, and amounted to “the most violent assault on Jewish life in pre-Holocaust modern history” (page 2).

There is no doubt – and McGeever reiterates it throughout his narrative – that the overwhelming majority of victims in Ukraine in 1919 were killed by “White” counter-revolutionary and Ukrainian nationalist forces, or in territory controlled by them. Neither is there any question that the policy of the Bolshevik leadership, rooted firmly in Russian socialist tradition, was what we might today call “zero tolerance”. McGeever traces how that policy played out in practice.

How is it that the Russian revolution, “a moment of emancipation and liberation”, was “for many Jews accompanied by racialised violence on an unprecedented scale” (page 2)? McGeever answers by focusing, on one hand, on the minority of pogroms committed by (at least ostensibly) “Red” forces, and on the other, on the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet institutions’ response. The strengths, he argues, emanated largely from initiatives by Jewish socialists, including many who remained outside the Bolshevik party in 1917 and joined during the civil war.

McGeever’s book is impeccably researched, thoughtfully argued, and – no small thing at a time when academic publishing more and more resembles a sausage machine – well organised and carefully edited. In this review I look at three key issues: the way that antisemitism overlapped with revolutionary politics (e.g. “eliminate the bourgeoisie and the Yids!”); the limits to the Bolshevik response; and the part played by Jewish socialists in combating antisemitism.

“Red” antisemitism

The revolution of February 1917 destroyed the tsarist empire and the legal apparatus of its dictatorship. More than 140 anti-Jewish statutes, which made Jews second-class citizens and confined them to the Pale of Settlement, were swept away, along with legal constraints on peasant farmers, on freedom of speech and assembly, and on much else. But the explosion of social mobilisation, which culminated later in 1917 in mass desertion from the army, land seizures by peasants and factory occupations, had its ugly sides, including a resurgence of antisemitism.

McGeever records that, from the start, the soviet movement issued appeals to combat antisemitism, and warned of its ability to “disguise itself under radical slogans” (page 26). And it needed to: speakers at a street corner rally in Petrograd urged crowds to “smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” (as the Red Guards would do in Hlukhiv a few months later) (page 24); people queuing to vote for the Constituent Assembly called on “whoever’s against the Yids” to vote Bolshevik (page 31); absurdly, as Alexander Kerensky left the Winter Palace, when his government fell, he read a slogan, painted on a wall, “down with the Jew Kerensky, long live Trotsky!” (page 32).

Before the revolution, the socialist opponents of tsarism had all resolutely opposed antisemitism, although they were divided as to how to respond to its manifestation among workers. (The Russian left parties seem to strike a contrast with those in France, Germany and Austria, where antisemitism ran rampant not just on the streets but among prominent politicians.[1]) In 1917, anti-Bolshevik socialists, and the Mensheviks in particular, accused the Bolsheviks of harbouring or tolerating antisemitism. McGeever urges that such accusation be treated with caution: under circumstances when the right-wing socialists were siding with the pro-war government, while the Bolsheviks were siding with the fast-radicalising masses, this was easy mud to throw. But the aspirations that underpinned the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October – peace, bread and land – can not be neatly fenced off from antisemitism either. “Revolution and antisemitism existed not only in conflict but in articulation as well”, McGeever insists (page 30).

Jews demonstrating in St Petersburg in March 1917.
The banners 
greet the “democratic republic” and “people’s socialism”. 
Via Sergey Fomin on Livejournal

This articulation persisted in the hellish conflict in Ukraine in 1919. McGeever makes a convincing case that, especially (but not only) among Ukrainian peasants, revolutionary hopes overlapped with murderous antisemitism. The peasants, overwhelmingly Ukrainian by nationality, saw towns – with high proportions of Russian and Jewish people, whether workers or middle class – as hostile and foreign. “[T]he ‘cityman’ represented a ruthless profiteer, an oppressor of the poor Ukrainian toiler” (page 91). This perception could turn into hostility to “communists”, who were “urban, non-Ukrainians who stood aloof from peasant life; they were ‘Russian oppressors’ and, above all, ‘speculating Jews’” (page 92). Such prejudices were on one hand fed on by the Whites, but on the other hand could fade into a grotesque combination of pro-soviet antisemitism. “Down with the Yids, down with this Moscow Communist government, long live Soviet power!”, shouted peasants in Poltava (page 92)

The violent culmination of this left antisemitism was the armed incursion led by Nikifor Grigor’ev, a peasant ataman who first allied with the Red army and then turned on it. McGeever quotes his Universal, a manifesto that called peasants to revolt (page 98):

In place of land and freedom they [the Bolsheviks] have subjected you to the commune, to the Cheka, and to the commissars, those gluttonous Muscovites from the land where they crucified Christ. […] Down with the political speculators! … Long live the power of the soviets of the people of Ukraine!

In early May 1919, Grigor’ev, having taken Odessa in the name of the Red Army, turned against the Bolsheviks. Over the next 18 days his units perpetrated at least 52 pogroms, in which at least 3400 Jews were killed. McGeever relates, in excruciating detail, how local Soviets, and some Red army units that were supposed to be fighting Grigor’ev – in particular, the notorious 8th Soviet Ukrainian regiment – joined in. In some regiments, communists who opposed antisemitism were heavily outnumbered by pogromists: in the 3000-strong 6th regiment, which carried out a pogrom in Vasylkiv in mid April, a group of communist soldiers who called on their comrades-in-arms not to attack Jews comprised 42 members, falling to 20 during early 1919 (page 125).

McGeever’s excruciating account of “Red” pogroms should give any communist pause for thought. His insight that the social forces on which the Bolsheviks relied were prone to antisemitism – that it was not, as the Bolsheviks claimed, solely an external, “counter-revolutionary” phenomenon (see below) – is essential. Further, in the conclusions to the chapter on Ukraine in 1919, he writes that “antisemitism provided a conduit for […] partisan Red Army soldiers to make the journey from ‘revolution’ to ‘counter-revolution’”; that in the social formation that supported Bolshevism in Ukraine, “antisemitism was a dominant form of consciousness”; that the Bolsheviks’ attempts to combat this were fraught with difficulties since “antisemitism and ‘Bolshevism’ were often co-extensive projects in the popular imaginary”; and that the Grigor’ev revolt “seemed to represent what many within the Bolsheviks’ social base in Ukraine desired: a populist leftist government that represented ‘true Bolshevism’ or true ‘Soviet power’” (pages 110-111). This left me with questions.

The description of the Ukrainian peasantry, and peasants who at times found themselves in the Red Army, as “the Bolsheviks’ social base” (on pages 92, 94 and 111) over-simplifies a complex, many-sided relationship. The Bolshevik presence in Ukraine was largely urban (through party branches in the towns, who were active in the soviets) and military. As McGeever acknowledges, the Red Army in Ukraine included large numbers of peasants-in-uniform who had transferred directly from defeated White forces and partisan formations. “Although nominally Soviet, the Bolshevik leadership could scarcely be confident of their allegiance, let alone attempt to control them”; the centralisation of the Red Army in Ukraine was “simply impossible” (page 93).

And this was just the start of the problem. Peasant support for the Reds was often constrained not only by antisemitism but by opposition e.g. to compulsory grain procurement and clashing conceptions of what “soviet democracy” might mean. Rural and urban political cultures really were distant from each other. Across Ukraine, and much of Russia, “green” peasant formations resisted both Reds and Whites, or sided with the Reds, only to revolt against them when the Whites were irreversibly defeated. There were Don Cossack Reds under Filipp Mironov who joined the Red Army but, when they pressed demands for political autonomy, were suppressed; there were the left Socialist Revolutionaries (Borotbisty) (mentioned in passing by McGeever) and of course the formations led by the anarchist, Nestor Makhno (mentioned in a footnote).

To investigate these multiple facets of Ukrainian peasant politics would be another book. But McGeever’s book sometimes lacked a sense of this larger context within which the battles over antisemitism were fought. I also wonder whether he attributes more agency to the Bolsheviks than they could possibly have had in Ukraine in 1919. With Grigor’ev, he writes, they “were gambling the future of the revolution on a partisan and highly contentious social base” (page 96), and he quotes Antonov-Ovseenko’s absurdly indulgent view of Grigor’ev. Perhaps further research would show that Grigor’ev was simply playing the Reds, who were unable to do more than acknowledge the poisoned chalice of his support, for as long as it lasted.[2]

Whatever the answer to such questions, they do not detract from the strength of McGeever’s main argument. “Red” pogroms were conducted not only by temporary fellow-travellers such as Grigor’ev, but also by more well-established units, and by local party organisations. Examples McGeever gives (pages 108-110) include pogroms during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 perpetrated by units of the First Red Cavalry, led by Semen Budennyi, one of the Soviet government’s most trusted forces. Scores of Budennyi’s troops, possibly up to 400, were executed as punishment (page 180).

The Bolshevik response

In 1918, the Bolshevik government in Moscow mounted an emphatic response to the new state’s first wave of pogroms – albeit with considerable delay, between the Hlukhiv massacre in March and the formation of the short-lived Commission for the Struggle against Antisemitism and Pogroms in May. It took further action in 1919-20: in the Red Army, pogromists faced punishments up to and including execution, which in keeping with the prevailing chaos were implemented unevenly and sometimes not at all. Jewish socialists played a leading role in coordinating this response, and I discuss this below. Here I look at McGeever’s arguments about the political limitations of these initiatives, which comprised one of the world’s first state-led anti-racist campaigns.

In early 1919, as antisemitic violence gathered pace, the first senior Soviet leader to take action was Khristian Rakovskii, then effectively head of the Soviet government in Ukraine. He issued an order warning that those spreading “antisemitic propaganda” were subject to arrest, with a specific warning to those in Red Army uniforms of “the most brutal and severe measures” (page 114). This order, issued nearly a year after Hlukhiv, was the first public acknowledgment by a Bolshevik leader that there were Red, as well as White, pogromists. Such frankness in public was an exception to the rule. McGeever shows that the Soviet press was extremely slow to take up the cudgels against antisemitism, and that when it did, it first avoided mention of, and later actually suppressed information about, Red Army involvement.

In Ukraine, the coverage of the anti-Jewish massacres was mixed. In April 1919, as reports of pogroms intensified, local Bolshevik party newspapers regularly denounced antisemitism, but the two largest-circulation Red Army newspapers there published not a single article on antisemitism between them. Jewish communists attributed the problem, in part, to Moscow. In mid-May, with Grigor’ev’s slaughter campaign in full swing, their protests were finally heeded with the first-ever lead article on antisemitism in Pravda, the Moscow-based Bolshevik flagship title. A second, and last, lead article on the subject appeared in June – only after the Orgburo, the day-to-day working committee of senior party leaders pointed out “for the third time” how “essential” it was to speak out (page 128). As for antisemitism in the Red Army, this was effectively “render[ed] invisible”. A table, categorising pogroms in January-August 1919 by type of perpetrator, was sent to Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei (The Life of Nationalities), the newspaper of the Commissariat for National Affairs. A column attributing 120 pogroms, with 500 fatalities, to the Red Army, was simply deleted – and the number of killings attributed to Grigor’ev cut from 6000 to 4000 (page 131).

The Bolsheviks’ refusal publicly to discuss antisemitism in the state’s institutions and army was informed by an understanding of it as an external, “counter-revolutionary” force. McGeever points to key statements by Lenin, who called antisemitism the work of “capitalists, who strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races”, and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, who attributed it solely to “the Russian bourgeoisie”, who use it to “divert the anger of exploited workers”. McGeever argues that such “reductive conceptualisations failed to account for the many-sided nature of antisemitism, and, in particular, the way it traversed the political divide, finding expression within the left as well as the right” (page 120).

After the civil war, as the Soviet state consolidated its institutions and control over its territory, this crude view of antisemitism as a weapon wielded by external enemies became standardised. So did the public silence on “Red” pogroms. One of several examples given by McGeever is a book on the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919 by Sergei Gusev-Orenburgskii, published in Petrograd in 1921. It was “heavily redacted by Soviet censors such that each and every reference to Bolshevik and Red Army antisemitism was deleted”, shortening it by 100 pages (page 133). Keeping Red Army antisemitism out of the public domain at all costs became “a well-established practice” (page 135).

The reductive view of antisemitism also disarmed the Bolsheviks before workers and peasants who saw Jews as lazy speculators. “In the popular imaginary, ‘the Jew’ was often positioned in an antagonistic class relation to the ‘working people’”, McGeever writes (page 183). This perception filtered through Soviet and Red Army institutions in numerous ways. Given the circumstances – of being surrounded by an unprecedented racist slaughter – the anti-capitalist discourse used by party propagandists sometimes trod a politically questionable line. What were officials in Moscow thinking when they sent directives in mid-1919, at the height of the Ukrainian nightmare, to “sweep away the speculators who have stolen from you”? What were Red Army commanders in Kyiv smoking when they sanctioned the distribution of posters urging “beat the bourgeoisie”, a wording all too close to the age-old pogromists’ chant, “beat the Yids” (page 184)?

Later on, in the 1920s, McGeever relates how Jewish communists discussed the position of Jews in the Soviet state with reference to the fight for hard work and against speculation, “and ‘Jewish speculation’ specifically” (page 202). Here a key trope of left antisemitism merged with the obsession with “honest labour” and productivity, which became prominent in Soviet discourse as the Bolsheviks strove to put the economy back on its feet and restore labour discipline.
 
The second conference of Jewish sections of the Communist Party, June 1919.
From Antisemitism and the Russian revolution / the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York


McGeever describes how, during the civil war, local, and even national, Bolshevik officials often retreated before a mass of demands that Russians, rather than Jews, be sent to fill responsible posts, and a constant barrage of unsubstantiated complaints that Jews were avoiding front-line service in the Red Army. He looks at a proposal by Lenin, made in November 1919 when the Bolsheviks were putting together institutional structures in Ukraine, on top of civil war wreckage, to “keep a tight rein on Jews and urban inhabitants, […] transferring them to the front, not letting them into government agencies (except in an insignificant percentage and in particularly exceptional circumstances, under class control)” (page 193). The proposal was adopted and published in a sanitised version with the reference to Jews omitted. But McGeever argues convincingly (page 195) that Lenin was responding to the widespread belief that Jews were underrepresented at the front and overrepresented in comfy offices.

Another recommendation made in Bolshevik leadership meetings was to counter antisemitism in the Red Army by deploying Jewish communists in regiments dominated by peasants, which “would have the effect of reducing counter-revolutionary sentiments among the Red Army milieu” (page 187). To my mind, that was a good suggestion, although McGeever thought that, while motivated by a desire to counter antisemitism, it emphasised “changing Jews” rather than changing those with antisemitic ideas.

This controversy over the deployment of Jews in Ukraine was part of a longer-standing discussion about Jews taking prominent Soviet state positions. Trotsky, the ultimate assimilated internationalist Jew, spoke in 1923 and wrote again in his autobiography in 1930 about how in 1917 he had refused some of the most senior state positions for fear of acting as a red rag to antisemitic bulls chasing “Jew-communists”.[3]

Jewish socialists’ practice

The first Soviet state responses to the 1918 pogroms came at the end of April, in Moscow, when the regional government body (Moscow Sovnarkom) coordinated a propaganda campaign, and called on the Cheka (extraordinary commissions, the embryonic security police apparatus) to act against pogroms. McGeever shows that these actions were preceded by, and pushed forward, by a group of non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists.

In March 1918, in the midst of an unprecedented revival of Yiddish culture after the 1917 emancipation, these Yiddish speakers – members of the Poalei Zion, the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries – formed the Moscow Evkom (Jewish committee) (page 56). They protested vehemently at the lack of central action against rising antisemitism; on 11 April their representative, David Davidovich, addressed the All Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK, effectively the government). “It was the non-Bolshevik Jewish socialist who pressed antisemitism on to the agenda of the Bolshevik leadership. This dynamic would resurface time and again” (page 66). For the Jewish socialists,

[T]he slaughtering of Jews was not epiphenomenal, nor was it a mere facet of the revolutionary process. It was the fundamental question in the spring of 1918, and it shaped their own engagement with the revolution during this period

The earth-shattering political events that followed – the outbreak of the Russian civil war, the failed German revolution of November 1918, and the Proskuriv pogrom by the Whites in mid-February 1919 – galvanised Jewish socialists. The Jewish groups – like many other socialist parties across the old Russian empire – split, usually along pro- and anti-Bolshevik lines. The Jewish communists, retaining varying degrees of autonomous organisation, merged into the Bolshevik party. They called on Jews to join the Red Army to fight Whites and pogromists. As one of these groups, the Komfarband, declared at its founding conference in May 1919, the pogroms had “not been able to stop the revolutionary process”, but on the contrary, had raised “the level of revolutionary energy among the urban [Jewish] poor, before whom stands the prospect of physical extermination” (page 148).

The Jewish communists’ response to the pogroms was underpinned by an “ethical imperative”, in McGeever’s phrase (pages 85, 160-161, 171). They spoke from the subject position of “racialised outsiders”, a concept he borrows from the sociologist Satnam Virdee. There was a tension between this and the approach of most Bolsheviks, for whom the fight against pogroms was subordinate to the larger struggle against counter-revolution.
Jewish organisations at a May Day demonstration in Petrograd, the Soviet capital, 1919.
Photo from the Jewish Museum, Moscow, via the Perevodika site

This was starkly evident at a conference of the Evsektsiia (Jewish sections of the Bolshevik party) on 1 June 1919. Ia. Mandel’sberg, a Komfarband representative, interjected in a debate about the sections’ orientation to the Jewish middle class, that “the main enemy of the Jewish working class is antisemitism, and to fight it we need urgently to outline a set of concrete measures”. Semen Dimanshtein, head of the Evsektsiia and more ideologically committed to Bolshevism, retorted that “antisemitism is not a special Jewish question, as Mandel’sberg thinks … it is a plague on the revolution; it is the slogan of the counter-revolution” (page 163).

None other than Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the VTsIK and titular head of the Soviet state, who was attending the meeting as a guest, intervened, implicitly supporting Mandel’sberg. He pointed out: “There are no other people who have shed as much blood as the Jewish people have … no honest person can remain indifferent to the current mass murder of the Jews.” Arkadii Al’skii, like Dimanshtein a committed Bolshevik, refuted Kalinin’s argument, insisting that “Jewish communists fight under the banner of the Russian Communist Party against all enemies of the revolution, no matter who they are”; they approached the issue of antisemitism not as “Jewish national-Communists” but as “Communist Jews who have no connection with the Jewish bourgeoisie” (page 165). Kalinin, to the astonishment of the meeting, walked out. Would that Mandel’sberg and others had been able to adapt a slogan from the future: “Jewish lives matter.”

It is to McGeever’s credit that he has recovered these pioneering discussions on what we would today call the politics of anti-racism. The conversations were cut short. In the early 1920s, many of the most prominent Evsektsiia activists were dispersed, to work in Soviet departments or universities, or to continue their struggle in other countries.

By the time of the major post-civil-war state campaign against antisemitism, launched in 1926, the Soviet state had changed beyond recognition. In the run-up to the first five year plan and forced collectivisation, antisemites were added to an “ever-growing list of harmful enemies, alongside kulaks, priests, wreckers, speculators and hooligans”, McGeever writes (page 214). The campaign was motivated less by a desire to protect Jewish life than by the larger state project of targeting threats to the regime. Including much of the peasantry, it could be added.

Concluding comments

Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution is welcome because of the care with which McGeever examines the history of the revolution as an interaction between political forces – the Bolshevik party, and the Jewish socialists who fought alongside it – and society. The particular problem of antisemitic violence is abstracted from the general process of revolution and civil war, into which it has often been subsumed.

For communists, McGeever’s work is especially timely. We live at a strange conjuncture, when hero-worship of the Bolsheviks has been resurrected in the mythical construct of “ecological Leninism”.[4] Rather than yearning for 20th century heroes to resolve our 21st century problems, McGeever focuses soberly on how the Bolsheviks, and others, dealt with the life and death problems in front of them.

The internationalism with which the Russian revolution became associated, its function as a focus for anti-imperialist struggles throughout the twentieth century, now appears to be one of its most significant legacies. The Bolsheviks “can not claim exclusive credit for putting the struggle against colonialism on the political agenda of the 20th century”, Steve Smith concludes in his recent history of the revolution, but it was the Communist International (Comintern) that “popularised militant anti-imperialism” and served as a training ground for leaders of national liberation struggles.[5]

Without minimising the Soviet Union’s imperial dimension, Smith adds, the Soviet “commitment to affirmative action and empowerment programmes for ethnic minorities” looked forward to much that changed in the second half of the twentieth century elsewhere. Priyamvada Gopal, in her history of resistance in the British empire, argues that the overthrow of tsarism had “a galvanising influence on resistance to imperial rule in many parts of the world”; the Comintern “was a significant catalyst” to the process of resistance, even though its vacillations were sometimes part of the problem.[6]

Against this background, McGeever’s focus on the first and most immediate manifestation of national or racial oppression during the revolution – the frightful assault on Jews – seems especially relevant. His account of the overlap between the emancipatory hopes raised in millions of people by the revolution and the poison of antisemitism is compelling.

As for the socialist actors in his story, he shows how the Bolsheviks’ efforts to counter antisemitism were hamstrung not only by the dire circumstances, but by their narrow, ideologised understanding of how antisemitism worked. Kalinin’s implicit rejection of that approach, pushed by the Jewish socialists at the Evsektsiia meeting in June 1919, really stuck in my mind. In many ways the Jewish socialists’ struggles – alongside, and sometimes in sharp disputes with, the Bolsheviks – foreshadow the struggles that Gopal describes, by African, Indian and Caribbean socialists with their British and other counterparts later in the twentieth century. Working over the lessons of those struggles, notwithstanding the real human tragedies that surrounded them, is inspiring. / May 2021.

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A review of Antisemitism and the Russian revolution, by Neil Rogall (RS21)

More on People & Nature about Russian history

The Kronshtadt revolt and the workers’ movement (March 2021)

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: staring history in the face (May 2018)

Russia and Ukraine: history called up on national service (July 2015)

[1] See Hannah Arendt on “Leftist Antisemitism”, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017), pp 53-65

[2] A standard account of the civil war is Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987). Trotsky, when he arrived in Ukraine in May 1919, reported to the Bolshevik central committee that “the prevailing state of chaos, irresponsibility, laxity and separatism” exceeded the most pessimistic expectations. M. Meijer (ed.), The Trotsky Papers I (1917-1922) (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 431.

[3] Trotsky, My Life, chapter 29 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/&gt;; Valentina Vilkova, The Struggle for Power: Russia in 1923 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1997), pages 183-184

[4] On “ecological Leninism”, see for example Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020), and this reviewer’s comments in: S. Pirani, “The direct air capture road to socialism?”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, March 2021.

[5] S.A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: an empire in crisis 1890-1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

[6] Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent (London: Verso, 2020), p. 211

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The Russian Revolution ➖ How Emancipatory Hopes And Anti-Semitic Poison Overlapped